(Star Time International)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Though the core of their sound, evoking gritty late '70s NYC, remains the same, the Walkmen have ended up being a very different band from the one suggested by their 2002 debut album. Just for a start, look at their best song and for my money the best song of the 2000s, "The Rat," an angry kicking against whatever darkness, whatever loneliness may surround -- a lifting up through pounding drums and unceasing guitar. Or look at their extraordinary albums of 2008 and 2010 respectively, You and Me and Lisbon, and their Van Morrison-like subservience to unkempt emotion and awestruck beauty. I tend to think of the Walkmen now as a band that captures triumph, that describes picking oneself up to reach adulthood and maturity and happiness and all the conflicts those things create, all the challenges time itself can't help but throw in. But on the very first track of their first album, "they're winning." I don't know if it's my imagination or what, but on Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone, I feel like the Walkmen are opening their career in a fatalistic mindset, they're winning and we've been had and wake up, stop talking. These are the sounds of someone who's given up.
I don't know for sure, of course. I don't know what might have inspired the remnants of Jonathan Fire*Eater, once the great white hope of DreamWorks and one of the most hyped bands of the late '90s, to recruit Hamilton Leithauser and Peter Bauer and wail out "The headaches and worries / And crying and bills to pay / How could they keep it up so long?" It was probably the mood of those times. Even before 9/11, I remember the early 2000s as a morbidly depressed period, as the beginning of a tragic decline to our national character. A million things personal and non could've been going through the Walkmen's heads back then.
But to me, this album is about my dad, who died this weekend. It's funny because he would've hated the way Hamilton sings -- he didn't like throaty, tune-challenged vocalists and really loathed Bob Dylan in particular -- but that's what is suggested to me by not just the words and the defeatist mood but the music itself, the lonesome and sad distance that makes me think of how little I finally understood my father, and how much I was able to move past that (not enough). I knew the warm person I knew as a child was there somewhere, but increasingly far away from me, like those distant guitars here that you can sense have a chiming, delicate sweetness but seem to be spilling out from another room, where they are singing to some other party. The way some of the songs never quite seem to start, and the mood of waiting for a release that never quite occurs.
When I think really carefully about what my dad never got to do and the physical therapy he didn't want to participate in and the time he drove doped up to Wilmington to empty a storage unit and didn't speak to anyone, just felt for some reason that it was important, I think of "Wake Up" -- the pounds of disappointment -- and "The Blizzard of '96," so strange and mysterious but somehow human and familiar, somehow a shadow of something vividly remembered. I wonder about that drive, I wonder what during those two hours coming and going he listened to on the radio. I wonder if it rained and whether he put on the wipers. I wonder if as he slept at my grandfather's house that night he knew it would be the last time he saw the city in which he grew up, if he suspected he only had a few weeks left. I think he probably did.
The suffering is over now. We're all left with dreaming and remembering, wondering what we could've done differently because we all -- the three of his children -- have fallen away from him in recent years, and was it our fault or his or no one's? Was it just the way people form and trail off when they've built their own lives? He knew my brother and I turned out all right and were happy; I wish he could have felt the same about my sister but somehow it's like these songs (which she wouldn't like either) are about her too. And then I think, the surrealism of losing a parent, of the unit of support that was so constantly there for so many years, and this album's title track seems so precisely to convey that. Even just the languid sadness of the cover art, I see my dad in that too. I see how scared he was, how out of time he felt, how much he wanted things different.
And in all of this I hear his disappointment. Not in me, though I suppose it's possible he felt that, but in the world. I hear that in the legendary "We've Been Had," a song that I heard the Walkmen perform in an elegiac reprise this past January, before the cancer began to really eat away at Dad. The hauntingly pretty rolls of the piano, and the way Hamilton takes the melody far above its technical structure, just letting the song sing him -- those are hints of the afternoon sun, the peace that might be in the future. Its words so accurately describe the things I wish might have carried him through.
I see myself change as the days change over
I hear the songs and the words don't change
I write them out of the book right there
We've been had, you say it's over
Sometimes I'm just happy I'm older
We've been had, I know it's over
Somehow it got easy to laugh out loud
He was so far out of my world in a way. He had a different immediate family now. They were the ones who were with him. But I can think of him in my own way. I can understand what always hurt him, and what hurt him at the end, and what I hope finally let him go and gave him relief. Tonight I think of him in this music and try to measure it all and make sure I can be at peace with the end. Tomorrow I'll remember the good things, but today the ups and downs and all of it. Today I let the questions I'll never properly answer float around and I do my best to be silly and nice and live my own life but I won't forget them. And tomorrow we don't go on as if nothing happened, we just "go on."
[SEE ALSO:]
Lisbon (2010)
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